Business-focused social media platform LinkedIn has been hit with three digital privacy class action lawsuits alleging it illegally intercepted users’ sensitive medical information for use in targeted advertising.
All three lawsuits filed by Bursar & Fisher in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and Santa Clara County Superior Court assert wiretapping claims under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). The complaint was filed on behalf of a participant who made an appointment on the website of medical company Spring Fertility. Therapymatch Inc., an online psychotherapy platform, does business as Headway. and Village Practice Management Co., an accessible urgent care provider doing business as CityMD.
The lawsuit alleges that LinkedIn accessed users’ private personal and health information, including their gender, sexual orientation, and the condition they are seeking treatment for, through a tracking tool called the LinkedIn Insight Tag placed on company websites. He is accused of accessing it.
“Tracking technology litigation, including wiretapping litigation under CIPA, essentially affects any company that operates a public website,” said Stacey Boven, a privacy and technology attorney at Nixon Peabody who heads the company’s tracking technology team. There is a possibility that it will be given.” “This case has implications for a wide range of industries, particularly those that benefit greatly from the use of data for customer management and advertising purposes.”
LinkedIn is a Microsoft-owned company based in Sunnyvale, California, and is the world’s largest professional networking site, with more than 1 billion users, according to its website. In addition to job search and career development services, LinkedIn provides marketing tools in the form of LinkedIn Insight tags. This is a snippet of JavaScript code that leverages the LinkedIn cookie that businesses can embed on their websites to track visitor activity. After matching website visitors to LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn provides consumer engagement analytics to businesses based on the data collected to improve marketing strategies and targeted advertising campaigns.
The tag’s functionality is similar to Meta’s Facebook Pixel, a tracking tool that sends data about users’ interactions with websites to Meta, and has been the subject of dozens of privacy class action lawsuits since 2022. In the Meta Pixel healthcare case, personal medical information was provided to hospital and healthcare provider websites through Pixel installations. Mr. Mehta, along with Spring Fertility, has been named as a co-defendant in one of the LinkedIn lawsuits, JS v. Spring Fertility Holdings.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers say that even though LinkedIn requires users to agree to a privacy policy, cookie policy, and (for California residents) California privacy disclosures, It claimed there was a lack of transparency about the nature of the data being siphoned off. . “We collect and process personal data about you only where we have a legal basis to do so,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers said, citing LinkedIn’s privacy policy. LinkedIn’s collection of sensitive medical data is not “legal” under state or federal privacy laws, users often do not know which websites have implemented the tags, and they cannot legally consent to it. He says he can’t.
Boven said that as CIPA complaints become more “sophisticated” and “detailed,” it is no longer enough for companies to simply rely on their privacy and cookie policy usage.
“As this trend in tracking technology continues to grow, companies with public websites should understand their data usage practices, limit the use of their data whenever possible, and monitor how their data is used. “We need to take proactive steps to inform users and, most importantly, obtain their consent before their data is being collected,” she said.
“We intend to demonstrate that our advertising tools protect the privacy of our members and that these claims are unfounded,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Plaintiff attorneys at Bursar & Fisher did not respond to requests for comment.
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